The debut novel of oncologist Austin Duffy takes its title from a Stanley Plumly poem about cancer, which is a presiding spirit in this tale of a doctor who has fled the treatment frontline for a research job in New York. The narrator spends his days tending a lab mouse, Henrietta – named after Henrietta Lacks, the 1950s patient whose “immortal” tumour cells she has received – and avoiding human entanglements with a beautiful hospital translator and with his estranged wife in Dublin.
A restrained, rational presence, he finds it “calming to thoughtlessly follow the minute demands of the protocol”. Footnotes enhance the bid for clinical detachment, but under the surface you sense the trauma of seeing countless patients suffer and die. “For the most part,” he says, “there is nothing to do except sit across from them and be kind.” Through a beauty of description that extends to cancer itself, “dotted through the lungs in an infinite array like the sky at night”, the novel becomes an attempt to absorb, assimilate, even accept, our great natural enemy. A moving, rewarding and thoughtful book.
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